Making History

That’s what we do by telling your stories

By Sandra Olivetti Martin

Every summer, usually around the All Star break, we watch our favorite baseball movie, Bull Durham. Many of the lines in that good-hearted and now only slightly daring 1988 movie have become quotable, at least by fans.
Lines like How come in former life times, everybody thinks they were somebody famous? How come nobody ever says they were Joe Schmo?
That line paired, spontaneously and irreverently, with my reflections as we headed to Orange, Virginia last weekend. That’s Civil War country and Revolutionary War country, too, where everything is named after patriotic heroes of war and independence.
How much devotion is lavished on so few people, I reflected. How little we know, or care, about the Joe and Jane Schmos who were trying to get by — and incidentally making the nation — while the big names were making big decisions that might well crush them. That’s not how it’s done, silly, Susan Sarandon laughs back at Kevin Kostner, who shines as bright as the full moon reflecting her sun.
Except at Bay Weekly, that is how we do it.
Our chronicle of life in Chesapeake Country isn’t ­fixated on the half-dozen big names repeated in

48-point type

across most pages of our big newspapers. Washington politics we don’t mess with; celebrity either.
You don’t have to be famous to appear in our pages. Yes, you might meet the governor. But you’ll meet him as you would anybody else, as a citizen of Chesapeake Country engaging with the world.
Not all of us are setting the course of our state, and not all of us got to figure out how to spend $43.5 billion last year.
But all of us are making human history, in ordinary and extraordinary ways.
This week, for example, we feature Greg Kearns who each year invites hundreds of people to close encounters with hawks so fierce they can knock eagles out of the sky.
“I try to accommodate everyone,” Kearns says of his trips to band juvenile osprey. “It’s important to get people excited about nature. When they’re out there getting their hands on a bird, it’s a totally unique experience.”
One of those who got excited was reporter Sarah Jablon, who tells that story to you and thousands of other readers in this week’s paper.
That’s extraordinary.
At the other end of the spectrum is Charlotte Delaney, whose claim to fame so far as we know is as the mother of oddball Allen Delaney, Bay Weekly’s resident humorist. Spurred on by the many brides and grooms who sent us their wedding pictures for our July 13 Wedding Guide, Charlotte sent us her story with photos (below).
Most Americans — about 75 percent — get married. So weddings are an ordinary story. Yet each one meant the world to a couple of us, and when we read those stories, the top-of-the-world expectations are as clear as on the very day.
Certainly they are in Charlotte’s story of marrying on “June 4, 1944, during the war years. We had three weeks together before he, who was the pilot, flew off with his crew to Italy.”
We especially like to tell the stories of young people’s engagement with the world.
Last week, you’ll remember, it was the Elkie girls of Deale finding their way into the world with cameras.
This week, reporters Kathy Knotts and Pam Shilling tell the story of two ensembles of young actors and dramatists, The Talent Machine and Twin Beach Players Kid ­Playwrights. Both reporters let the kids tell their own stories, so you’ll hear their voices loud and clear as they “say what they’re thinking.”
If this is who Joe and Jane Schmo are, I’d be them for a life or two.
Enjoy their stories.
And remember, you can see those kids at play this weekend and next in North Beach and at St. John’s ­College, Annapolis.